


Already Broken

by LulaIsAKitten



Series: Denmark Street musings [29]
Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Genre: Angst, Drinking, Melancholy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:53:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24000907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LulaIsAKitten/pseuds/LulaIsAKitten
Summary: Why does the muse do this? At least three things I should be writing, and one line in one scene very early in Peaky Blinders (which I never saw and am using lockdown to catch up on) threw this at me. It’s darker than I usually go.
Series: Denmark Street musings [29]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1035698
Comments: 19
Kudos: 40





	Already Broken

**Author's Note:**

> Why does the muse do this? At least three things I should be writing, and one line in one scene very early in Peaky Blinders (which I never saw and am using lockdown to catch up on) threw this at me. It’s darker than I usually go.

At first she thinks she must have imagined the knock on the door. It’s late, past closing, and the streets are emptying. Not that many people wander down this way this late at night. It’s not a corner of London that’s popular with the in crowd, especially in high summer when the weather is as good as it has been lately. Then they want to sit on benches and in parks and along the river bank, not squeeze into a tiny, dingy pub with no outside tables. Even the ever-changing guests at the Travelodge round the corner tend to wander a little further in search of refreshment.

She’s almost done. The last drinker was ejected fifteen minutes ago, the cursory clean of the dank toilets is finished, the bar has been wiped. The few remaining glasses sit in the ancient dishwasher. It’s not full enough to run the machine tonight; the morning crew will finish the job.

The lights are all off save the ones above the immediate bar area, leaving the low, small room in blocks of shadow. Stools perch upside down on tables, casting up jagged fingers of darkness that slither along the smoke-tinged walls, fleeing from the lights of the occasional passing car.

There it is again, louder. Knocking.

“We’re closed!” she calls. Through the grimy window in the front door she can see a large, hunched figure, half leaning and half standing. It’s hard to tell if the swaying is caused by the vertical lines in the glass blurring and fracturing the image as she peers, or actual movement from the figure. Little though she can discern, there’s an air of melancholy about the looming lurker.

Her only answer is another knock.

She sighs, tosses the grey dishcloth into the tarnished metal sink below the bar and makes her way along to the end where a dark chunk of the cracked and ancient wood rests against the wall, allowing her out into the main area. She crosses to the door, her heels clicking on the still-sticky floor.

“Closed!” she shouts, lest there be any doubt this time.

The figure knocks again.

She hesitates, and against all sense reaches up to slide the bolt down. She inches the door open and peers out. “What?”

“You got whisky?” The voice is a deep baritone, the figure huge, but he manages to make it sound like a humble request rather than a demand. He’s massive, yet somehow small in the slump of his shoulders. He’s definitely seen better days, and better hours of today in fact. His eyes are dark smudges in his battered face, and even in the dank, shadowed doorway she can see the fading bruises across his cheekbone and jaw. His hair is a calamitous curly mess, his huge black coat swamping him. He’s the epitome of the large, threatening male, so why does she have the sudden sense of a small boy? How can this huge stranger possibly remind her of her son at the age of nine, when she had to tell him through her own tears that his grandfather had died?

“We’re closed,” she says again, but there’s something about him that gentles her voice, turns the no-nonsense tone she normally uses on after-hours drunks to an almost motherly one. She’s seen enough of them over the years, knows this one won’t hurt her.

“Just one,” he wheedles, a hint of a boyish smile breaking up the battered features. It’s a half-hearted, world-weary attempt at charm, but suddenly she’s imaging he could look reasonably handsome if he smiled properly. Inwardly she rolls her eyes at herself. She’s got no truck with any of that these days. That boat sailed long ago.

“And a piss,” he adds, as though this will somehow make her more likely to let him in.

It’s on the tip of her tongue to tell him to go piss in the alley like all the other drunks and head home to bed, so why does she open the door? She’s rewarded with a cheeky half-grin, and she rolls her eyes for real this time.

“One drink,” she tells him, knowing she’s breaking the law but also knowing that the chances of that being found out are close to zero. The stranger lurches past her into the pub and heads unerringly to the toilets. He’s been here before, then, although she hasn’t seen him. She slides the bolt closed against any further intrusions.

“You’d better have good aim!” she calls to his retreating back. “I’ve mopped in there!”

He raises an arm in acknowledgement and shoulders his way in the door of the gents; she moves back round to stand behind the bar and idly scans the whiskies they have on offer. It’s not exactly a wide range - the usual Famous Grouse, Jack Daniels. Jameson would be her choice, but she’s a pretty good judge of punters after so many years. This man is a single malt drinker. She wrenches the stopper, stiff with disuse, from the neglected bottle of Glenmorangie that sits on the counter muddled in with the liqueurs and reaches a glass down from the shelf.

He’s gone so long, she wonders if he’s fallen asleep in the toilets. That’ll not be fun, manoeuvring his kind of bulk back out onto the street. She’s just starting to seriously curse herself for her stupidity in allowing him entry when he reappears, swaying a little, moving towards her with the focused steps of the very drunk, planting each foot carefully. There’s a lurch to his walk that doesn’t seem entirely caused by the drink.

She slides the glass towards him, and watches as he settles himself with a sigh onto the stool. He’s under the bar lights now, and her eyes widen a little at the sight of him. The angle of his nose and the yellow-green that blooms across the bridge and both eye sockets suggest a recent break. His ear sports the scarlet swelling of a slow-healing cut. The hand that reaches for the whisky glass is wrapped in a filthy bandage that needed changing days ago; an angry slash of black across his palm is imperfectly covered by the loosening gauze.

“Jesus Christ, what happened to you?” she asks as he raises the glass and downs the whisky in one swallow, setting it back down on the scratched wood with a low thunk.

“A fight.” His voice is curt, clipped. He’s patently not going to discuss it. He slides the glass towards her and gives her a hesitant sideways glance; she shakes her head and reaches for the bottle.

“Clearly,” she retorts drily, pouring him another finger.

He reaches his uninjured hand into his coat pocket and pulls out a battered leather wallet and a half-crushed pack of Benson and Hedges.

“C’n I smoke?”

She shrugs. In for a penny. She ducks under the counter as he lights up, digging towards the back of the bottom shelf to retrieve an old ashtray which she plonks on the bar in front of him. It’s dusty and slightly beer-stained. She wonders when it last left its hidden corner.

He’s fumbling with his wallet now, spilling cigarette ash all over the bar. He manages to extract a note, and pushes it towards her. “You have one too.”

She eyes him, but she knows a drunken advance from a punter when she sees one and this isn’t it. He’s barely even glanced at her. He’s just being polite - and probably hoping she’ll let him stay longer if she joins in.

Stuff it. It doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere any time soon. She grabs another glass, pours herself a finger of the amber liquid, pulls her own cigarettes from her pocket. She knows full well Brendan smokes in here after his shift on a Thursday; she’s not the only one who bends the rules.

She lights up too and stands and watches him, cradling his glass and cigarette, his unfocused eyes on the cracked and ancient wood in front of him, and wonders how many hours he’s been drinking today, how many days he’s been drinking this week. She recognises the look of a man trying to drown demons.

“What brings you here, then?” The barmaid’s age old conversation-opener.

He shrugs. “Staying round the corner.”

“The Travelodge?”

“Yeah.”

“Business or pleasure?”

He snorts a laugh, derisive, bitter. “Neither.”

“Necessity, then.”

He gazes gloomily into his glass. “Yeah. Can’t go home.”

She wonders what’s at home that this giant of a man can’t face. Has his wife thrown him out? There’s no wedding ring, and no indentation where one might have sat. Doesn’t have to have been married, though. But where did he get the injuries?

It’s not her job to prise information out of the customers who sit in front of her. God knows, when they want to talk there’s no stopping them. He’ll open up if he needs to.

His glass is empty. She pours another small measure, steps back to lean her hips against the bar behind, her head next to the optics. She smokes her cigarette and watches him and waits. They often start talking to fill the quiet, the gap in the conversation. It’s an old trick, but it works.

Not on this one. The stretching silence doesn’t seem to faze him; she’s not even sure he’s noticed. He shifts again on his stool, and the grimace that passes across his face isn’t from any injury she can see. She wonders what other bruises and cuts are hidden under the bulk of him, under his creased clothes and giant coat.

He’s sipping his drink slowly now, savouring this one. She can sense he’s not going to stay much longer.

Eventually he raises his gaze to hers. His dark eyes are piercing but kindly. She gets the sense of a lost soul, but a good one, and is amused at her own whimsy after one small measure of whisky. They’re basically all the same, these men she’s seen over the years, who think the answer to their problem can be found at the bottom of a bottle. Good or bad, justified or not, they’re just trying to escape something. Usually themselves.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m not much company.”

She shrugs. “I don’t think you came here for the small talk.”

He huffs a little sound of amusement. “No.”

He appears to make an effort, pulling himself up a little straighter as though he could shrug off the melancholy with his coat if he so chose. “Tell me about you.”

She raises an eyebrow. “You don’t really want to know my story.”

His eyes flicker away, but he has the grace not to lie, not to insist he wants to know all about her and where she comes from and why she’s here. Instead he says, with startling perception, “You’re Irish.”

She’s momentarily wrong-footed. It’s been years. Decades, in fact. Nobody spots the last vestiges of her accent, these days. She’s lived in London way longer than she ever lived in Dublin, now, and it must be fifteen years since she’s even set foot on the soil she no longer calls home. She stubs her cigarette out, taking a moment to regain her composure.

“I am. Was.”

For a moment, she sees a spark of interest in his gaze, but it fades as quickly as it arrived. She wonders if he might once have been more interested in the world around him. Finds herself hoping, for his sake, that he will be again.

“Sounds like there’s a back story there.” He’s at least feigning a connection to the world.

“There is.” But she’s not discussing with a stranger things that she barely even thinks about these days. “And it’s not up for discussion.” She grins, trying to lighten the mood that has suddenly slipped from melancholy into sombre. “I’d break your heart.”

He holds her gaze, and for a moment she can see blinding pain slide behind those dark, dark eyes, and suddenly she’s thinking of her son again, of the way he struggled to make sense of the incomprehensible, fought to reject a world that was suddenly full of pain. Remembers the feel of his small body, wrenching with sobs.

The stranger drops his gaze back to his glass. “Already broken,” he mutters, and she wants to reach for him, to lay her hand on his arm, to offer some crumb of human comfort—

It’s as if he senses the shift in the atmosphere. Tension has stiffened his frame; his very being rejects her sympathy. He swipes up his glass, downs the dregs, stubs his cigarette out in the ashtray.

“Thanks for the drink.” He sweeps wallet and cigarettes into his pocket and pulls himself off the stool, wincing a little as he sets his feet to the floor, holding the bar rail for balance in a way that doesn’t seem entirely necessary just to counteract his drunkenness. He’s halfway to the door before she manages to make her way around the bar and reach him. She steps ahead to pull the bolt and let him out.

“Any time,” she says softly, and he casts her half a smile in a face that’s guarded now, his expression carefully shuttered. His wounded heart barricaded.

She’s being fanciful. He gives her a curt nod as he steps past her into the night, swinging to the right and stumbling a little as he sets off down the pavement. She watches a moment, and then he slows, pauses to pull his cigarettes from his pocket and slide one from the pack.

She steps back into the pub, closes and bolts the door. It’s the work of a few moments to add their glasses to the dishwasher, swill out the ashtray, return the sticky bottle to its companions, re-wipe the bar. She slips the money he’s left into the charity box; it’ll be months or years before that bottle is pressed into service again. Its contents won’t be missed.

When she emerges from the side door, she glances up and down the street, but there’s no sign of the large stranger. For a moment she wonders if he’s really staying at the Travelodge, who he is, where he came from.

She shakes her head. Just another punter. She’ll probably never see him again. No sense letting his melancholy get under her skin.

She turns for home, the pub keys heavy in her pocket, and lights up another cigarette as she strides briskly down the street.


End file.
